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This is a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project transcript of astronaut James A. McDivitt, interviewed by Doug Ward at Elk Lake, Michigan, on 29 June 1999. McDivitt talks about flying F-86s in Korea, test pilot work at Edwards, and his first class at the Aerospace Research Pilot School. He also covers turning down Dyna-soar, joining NASA in 1962 and learning to be an Apollo Program Manager. He describes the Change Board and says decisions were not second-guessed.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-53 and we had to write—help write a lot of the test procedures to make sure we were testing the thing that we knew we needed in flight. WARD: So, how did all that stack up with the astronaut corps and their—and the level of confidence with this new contractor? Was there a lack of confidence as you went into the program? MCDIVITT: Well, not really. I don’t think the astronaut corps was involved in it. I think there were six of us involved in it. It was a prime and backup crew on their first spacecraft. We were the ones doing all the work. And remember, Gemini was still going on. The second crew really wasn’t involved in it much to start with. And so, there was just the six of us. And when I was on Gemini IV with just a prime crew and a backup crew, when we got into the EVA stuff and we had a lot of other things going on [Telephone rings, recorder turned off]. MCDIVITT: Let’s see. We were talking about— WARD: We were talking about the level of confidence that you as crewmembers had with this new contractor, North American. MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah. When we were the Gemini stuff, the test procedures we used in the Mercury were not significantly different than in Gemini. And when we got into Apollo, we were doing all these other things. And on Gemini, in Gemini IV, when we got around to flying this EVA thing and all the rush that we had right at the end, we just didn’t have enough guys. There were four people. So, I asked Deke and whoever was running the Flight Crew Support Division at the time to see if they couldn’t dig up some engineers to help us,
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